I don't know. I did this a LOT between age 5 and 15. Mostly it was because I learned vocabulary through reading a lot, and therefore, I had a good operational/contextual idea of what words meant, but not enough life experience to actually understand what was normative in conversational language, if that makes sense?
I can't remember some of them, but one really struck my 6th grade teacher as shocking-- when I reported a particular author's work as:
permeated, saturated, and later... perforated...
with particular qualities/characteristics.
Yes, I knew what perforated meant. I just thought that it was (kind of) applicable. I also thought it was much more spicy than repeating the term "permeated" in that essay. I also liked larger, more sophisticated vocabulary, and definitely chose to use a greater variety of words, particularly in my writing. I had learned by then that doing so VERBALLY really marked one as an oddball in the communication department.
I still occasionally choose a word that strikes others as unusual. It's more deliberate now, and I often choose that as an expression of how my own inner landscape differs from most others, I think.
